Tuesday, 6 November 2012

Thoughts from the weekend

I haven’t really been overly bothered about
my birthday for the last few years. With the exception of getting more post
than usual and getting gifts (and most of the time, cake), it’s just a regular
day. Living away from home in a different country meant that I really couldn’t
have cared less about turning 21. Since the vast majority of my friends are of
a similar age, I see people planning big occasions for their 21st
and I know that I’ll be missing 95% of them and its case of if I’m on a rare
occasion of being back in the UK, I’ll celebrate with you. If you’re in Germany
with me, then I’ll certainly do my best where appropriate.

So the trip to Frankfurt during the last
weekend of October sort of doubled up as a chance to celebrate my birthday. Our
plan of going to see Steel Panther backfired since we took far too long to
getting everyone to commit to the weekend and then by the time things could be
confirmed, tickets had gone. Not that I’m surprised...those tickets would have
flown out. To be honest, I don’t think we needed that gig in the end and we had
an utterly awesome weekend doing our own thing. As I said in my last post, I
definitely missed that crew far more than I’d realised, so I’m already counting
down the days until the next gathering...though I’m not totally sure where/when
that is. I think I know, but it’s pretty difficult to know for sure since it’s
kind of late, I have no internet access at the time of writing this and I’m in
a hotel room in Oberhausen.

If you’re wondering why I’m in a hotel room
in Oberhausen, I’m here because of the wXw/CZW weekend that’s going on at the
moment. Three shows across three days (plus a cinema screening of the
wXw/CZW/BJW Triangle documentary which was brilliant) with a whole host of
talent from across Europe and then some US guys with CZW that I’ve previously
had little/no real interest in seeing. Though having seen some of their
matches, I suspect a fair portion of that was because of prejudices towards
what I’d heard/seen on the internet of CZW being trash wrestling, but having
seen their guys work, they’ve got a pretty solid crew who can work both
straight matches and hardcore matches. It’s fair to say that I’ve changed my
perceptions of the hardcore/deathmatch style to professional wrestling in the
last few days, so that can only be a good thing. I really hope I did bring my
camera cable with me to Germany since I’ve got some cracking pictures on the
camera from the first two days.

NOTE: Turns out I did! And you can see those lovely pictures of wrestlers, blood and me on my Facebook page.

As twisted as it sounds, my favourite
picture might be of me and Drake Younger. He’d just come from a street fight
against Matt Tremont where they were bleeding heavily pretty quickly in the
match, they went around the building (including spilling some blood onto my
coat as they battled past having done some twisted stuff right in front of me),
and at the conclusion of the match went to intermission so the ring crew could
clean up. Both guys went to the merch tables to take photos with the fans and
say hello, and it gave me a chance to get photos with those guys and thank them
for the match. They’re both still covered in blood and Drake has a great big
smile. As I say, I’m not usually a fan of that style of match but I’ve found
myself coming round to them in recent weeks (largely thanks to an insightful
topic on deathmatches on UKFF with some cracking reviews from Richie Freebird).

Also, Greg Excellent loves Kenny Loggins.
He was super surprised when I was able to rattle off a couple of Kenny’s songs
and join in singing a couple. Those strange Americans...

Going back to my birthday, it was actually
a pretty good day. Work was never going to be super exciting, possibly because
it’s never super exciting. Interesting, yes...but not exciting. Not unless
they’ve got the secret jet pack development hidden away or some sort of dirt
racetrack for racing bikes and cars during lunch break. Thank you to everyone
who threw me a message on Facebook to wish me a good day, they were all read
(almost all were replied to) and all of them were appreciated.

There was a group of about 7 of us from
Leeds who were about in Hamburg since there was a state holiday in parts of
Southern Germany, so a couple of people headed up north to see friends. It gave
us a good excuse to go out into Hamburg for a couple of drinks and catch up,
which led to a pretty fun evening. A few drinks, talking to some strangers and
making friends with them and then finding ourselves in a karaoke bar on
Reeperbahn and stumbling across a group of English guys from Birmingham (who
were terrible at placing accents if they thought Kirstie was from Leeds...).
Fun place though, and of course...this is me we’re talking about, so I had to
try a couple of songs. You can never know how well they’re received...but I
stick to the plan of going for songs that aren’t technically difficult and just
require some energy and enthusiasm to make me look great. Also, do it when
people have had a bit to drink and you sound even better than you might do if
people were completely sober.

Very good to see some more people from uni
though, and it was good to get out there and meet/talk to some new people.
That’s definitely something I need to do a little bit more (including perhaps
getting some phone numbers to be able to see them again...).

Plenty to look forward to, but for now I’m
just looking forward to going to bed since it’s rather late and I’m tired. It’s
a bit strange to think that this is being written on Saturday night but won’t
be published until Monday afternoon, so it’s already a bit dated. We’re on
course to making this more regular than the very sporadic bi-monthly (and
sometimes less frequent) posts, let’s keep this up!

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About Me

I'm a German student at the University of Leeds.
Like everyone else, I'm on a journey through life. On this blog, I'll write about good things, bad things and random thoughts and ideas that I have in my head. Whether you read every single entry I write, or just read select entries, I hope you enjoy reading them and get to know a little bit about me.